


Pirate's Blessing

by mariusgaaazzh



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, M/M, murky angst, this boy is a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-13 05:04:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15356880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariusgaaazzh/pseuds/mariusgaaazzh
Summary: It's an easy thing to run from who you are, on the high seas.





	Pirate's Blessing

Edward stunk.

He mostly did, these days. He did not remember what he drank, or whom he fucked - most of things about himself he didn’t want to remember.

There are the soldiers of their own Fortune, he would tell himself. And the ocean was their field, to plow and to pick. And he chased after that vision.

Only at sea, he felt something, and a sense of purpose stirred within him -- even if that something was the sun stinging his eyes, and the waves hitting against Jackdaw’s freshly painted hull, and the thrill of a chase, when they spotted English or Spanish ships on the horizon and trailed them for hours, tiring the pursued crew as a hunter does its prey.

He would yell out orders, echoed by Adé passing them on to the crew - and would see the movement of his men across the deck, and the nearly synchronous cannon fire from the left side, and then - within few intoxicating minutes - they were ready to board.

The merchants surrendered, but the soldiers – sworn on their lives to protect the wealth of their empires – fought, and Edward would fight them.

He was the first to jump across the ship’s side, and the one to shoot his pistol neat between the captain’s eyes, and to set the gunpowder barrels on fire, and tear down the enemy flag, signaling their victory to the crew.

No bullet would reach him, he knew. It was the assassin’s creed, or the pirate’s blessing – he was wrought for different things.

The way he slid like a shadow among the masts was more than sailor’s skill. The way he pared three attackers at once was more than brawler’s gut. He could see further, and hear sharper, and the world folded itself into patterns which sometimes ordered themselves into shimmering gold light.

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

He relished the sheer power of those words. They went off inside his chest like the three sets of man o’ war’s cannons - beautiful and foreign in how they rolled, like the sobbing sound of shattering wood, like iron falling into the waters.

It was something that gave his soul voice and value, reflected it as the sea does the sun, in a way that no verse from the Scripture or a sailor’s song ever could.

And yet he ran from it, as a man might run from what he saw in the mirror – which was a fairly easy thing to do, on the high seas.

  
+

  
Their Republic was collapsing around him. It was a dream he believed in till its end, but wasn’t sure what it entailed. Freedom, they said. What was freedom?  
He couldn’t bear to look his own freedom in the eye.

Because in truth, with all of their proclamations and drunken toasts, the Pirates’ Republic was an accidental remainder in a game between the great empires, residue on the bottom of a cheap bottle passed around until dropped on the floor.

The crews raised a black flag and voted their captains, split their gold, and left it on the shore, chasing after ghosts of prosperity and freedom.

Most understood that the whatever liberty they knew came from the neglect of the British, rather than from their own will. But they could still talk about it. One’s life was too short out here, to contemplate politics. 

Edward never knew true chains, of which he was reminded – whenever they boarded ships that carried human cargo. And way too often it was – when they broke the heavy shackles, fetched someone who spoke Igbo from the crew, and changed the course to bring the men and women into relative safety of Nassau.

He was a free man in England, but wasn't sure if the good it did him. He had a plot of land, days to spend in honest work – and Caroline. And yet that wasn’t enough – he had no air to breathe, among the rolling green hills, flat southern speech, and the paths laid out in dirt by those who washed their lives into nothing before him.

Only when he was at the sea for the first time, with an enormous, breathing expanse of it splashing into his face, and then unfamiliar commands shouted into his ear against the wind – he felt like he had earned his name.

Yet, Caroline. He thought of her, in the calm nights during long runs between the islands – her full hips, testing eyes, and an uncompromising mind that never backed from a challenge. He missed her, and the longing ached in him as the last ambers of a dying bonfire.

He wished she could see what he had, but also understood – in the same way as he did the shoreline currents – that she was as distant from the equatorial stars, as he – from the promises he left her with.

 _I will come home_ , he told himself. But he didn’t know what home was, anymore. It was some hollow space between his ribs, an empty barrel rocked by waves. And he couldn’t say if something would ever fill it.

He tried to kiss Adéwalé, once.

The ship was docked in St Domingo for a few days – running the repairs and loading up fresh water, with most of the crew washing down their most recent spoils across the island.

Edward emerged from another tavern brawl, standing triumphant over some fellow offended by a look, knuckles bruised and heart reeling with abandon. And reached out for his rum – when he saw a familiar figure cut out against the brilliant night of the tropics, singled out in the crowd by a blind force that did not a have a name within him.

And it was a ping of some wishful hope that carried him, to nearly stumble against Adé, look into the white of his eyes, and press his mouth against his mouth to the drunk cheers of the onlookers, sloppy and lonely.

Then a warm, calloused palm pushed gently against his chest, and a voice amused, deep and thick like molten sugar said, “No, Captain.”

And Edward laughed then, dropping his head on Adé shoulder and saying something about the ship actually being his, and stumbled off to finish the bottle on the beach, where the sky was clear, and the rustling waves - calm, and the moon laid out a silver trail that they would follow tomorrow. And that was the end of it.

Edward gave no further thought to what happened – or to what he wished would have – and his eye did not linger on the broad shoulders, and his heart did not sting when Adé smiled. Something was getting slowly buried inside him, as a wreckage on the shore is slowly overcome by sands.

Mary – or Kidd -- she did not permit him even that, but simply laughed with her brass voice, when he leaned towards her. They were drinking ale on one of Nassau’s sunlit, dusty porches.

And Edward wanted to kiss the throat that produced such laughter, and hold the lean body against his.

Mary – or Kidd. He didn’t know which one of them he wanted more - a woman with blood on her lips and ink hugging the curves of her breasts, or a young man with a wry smile and a brash shrug of narrow shoulders. It all twisted inside him into a knot he could not untangle.

“No, Kenway.” She said, bright-eyed, and reached over the table to take to his hand into her smaller one. “Know who you are, first.”

But Edward didn’t know. Life was one blur of dazing sunlight that took him all and shed him from himself. And he simply didn’t have time for death, whenever it came knocking.  
+

He enjoyed deep diving: opening his eyes in the salt water: the darkness of the caverns, the strong currents of the ocean, and the miraculous creatures that inhabited its expanse.

He fished for treasure as some do for their supper, bashing in the old locks, and carefully moving the book pages damaged by minerals and age. There was a joy to it, uncovering things that the surface world has deemed as loss and ruin. 

He thought he wouldn’t make it, a few times - with the closest pocket of air too far away, the scent of his blood spreading through the water, and darkness crawling into the corners of his sight.

But he always did. And would emerge from the waters, laughing with his men on the deck, hauling the newly acquired riches

 _See, it is easy_ , he would tell them, _fortunes are scattered through those seas, only waiting for those resolute enough_.

His life would be short and brilliant, he always knew. But the moments he stole away from fate did not glitter, just as the Spanish gold he hauled from the shipwreck would not regain its shine.

Those who do not risk do not win.

But it was a harder thing to tell himself, when he had to count the losses in the crew after they boarded another frigate, after he had to count those who didn't make it back to the ship after another night in Havana, daggers in their backs.

When Edward stretched out in the hammock in his cabin, watching the familiar ceiling rock above him, he could not think of death -- nor the burning feeling in his lungs, nor the desperate exhaustion of the muscles.

He was elated, in fact, to be living. But he could not exactly remember what for.  
He drowned that lack of memory in rum, the sweetness of it washing the tang of salt from the back of his throat, and his head was clear for precious minutes.

But that was not enough. The more time he spent chasing his fortunes, which always seemed a step ahead, the more pieces of himself he seemed to have left along the road.

  
+

  
He did hold his hand over a candle, just to see how it feels, what he’s left with, after Thatch was murdered by the English. After the Crown had rained hell on whatever worth living for they have collected in their ragtag lives.

He wondered what he still had left, as he sat in his quarters, examining the blooming burn on his palm, clenching and unclenching it into a fist - just to test the extent of the damage. 

He asked himself the same thing, when he rose to Jackdaw’s deck, and saw all the faces turned to him in question.  
And as it turned out - a lot.

He had his crew, who cheered whenever he stepped onboard, and followed him into the maw of hell and back.

He had his skin. Under which there was a heart, which continued beating no matter what he did to it, and, now he knew fully, which no bullet would pierce.

He had the ocean underneath him. A wondrous expanse that hugged the world, and made itself into an endless pathway, for men who were willing to forge their fortune. And, somehow, this fortune was worth a try.

Nothing was true. And everything was permitted.

They will sail out to the coast of Africa, he decided.

Past the clear, beautiful waters of the Caribbean, and into the open sea, towards the Observatory.


End file.
